1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to transgenic fish, particularly green transgenic fish.
2. Description of Related Art
Transgenic technology involves the transfer of a foreign gene into a host organism enabling the host to acquire a new and inheritable trait. Transgenic technology has many potential applications. For example, it can be used to introduce a transgene into a fish in order to create new varieties of fish. There are many ways of introducing a foreign gene into fish, including: microinjection (e.g., Zhu et al., 1985; Du et al., 1992), electroporation (Powers et al., 1992), sperm-mediated gene transfer (Khoo et al., 1992; Sin et al., 1993), gene bombardment or gene gun (Zelenin et al., 1991), liposome-mediated gene transfer (Szelei et al., 1994), and the direct injection of DNA into muscle tissue (Xu et al., 1999). The first transgenic fish report was published by Zhu et al., (1985) using a chimeric gene construct consisting of a mouse metallothionein gene promoter and a human growth hormone gene. Most of the early transgenic fish studies have concentrated on growth hormone gene transfer with an aim of generating fast growing fish. While a majority of early attempts used heterologous growth hormone genes and promoters and failed to produce these fish (e.g. Chourrout et al., 1986; Penman et al., 1990; Brem et al., 1988; Gross et al., 1992), enhanced growth of transgenic fish has been demonstrated in several fish species including Atlantic salmon, several species of Pacific salmons, and loach (e.g. Du et al., 1992; Delvin et al., 1994, 1995; Tsai et al., 1995).
The tiger barb (Puntius tetrazona, or, historically, Barbus tetrazona, syn. Capoeta tetrazona, also known commonly as the Sumatra barb), originally from Asia (more specifically, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Borneo) has been commercially cultured in the United States at least as early as 1950 (Innes, 1950). The species name “tetrazona” refers to the four vertical stripes seen on the wild-type tiger barb. However, for the ornamental fish industry the dark striped pigmentation of the adult tiger barb does not aid in the efficient display of various colors. The albino tiger barb, or “albino barb” is a variant that arose during domestication and shows decreased pigmentation. The availability of such fish having modified pigmentation for transgenesis with fluorescent proteins would result in better products for the ornamental fish industry due to better visualization of the various colors.
Many fluorescent proteins are known in the art and have been used to investigate various cellular processes, including fluorescent proteins exhibiting various green, red, yellow, blue, or purple colors. Although transgenic experiments involving fluorescent proteins have provided new markers and reporters for transgenesis, progress in the field of developing and producing ornamental fish that express such proteins has been limited.